need that draws you toward it. The more serious the trouble, the stronger the need, so the more powerfully it pulls you in. You don’t need to be afraid of that sensation. From what I know, that’s not unusual.”
“That wasn’t the frightening part,” Sammie said as she cast a worried look at Kahlan. Her lower lip started quivering again. She seemed transfixed, unable to look away from Kahlan lying so still on the lambskin.
Richard put a finger under Sammie’s chin and turned her face back toward his. “Go on. Tell me what you saw.”
Sammie knitted her fingers together as she frowned while recalling the experience. “When I started slipping down into her, I began to be drawn in faster and faster. It took me deeper than I had expected. I realized that I wasn’t trying to go down into her, it was just that something kept pulling me down. It was like losing my footing as I slid down a steep, slippery slope.”
“I told you, that’s pretty normal.”
“That’s what I thought at first. But I soon realized that I wasn’t simply going down into her need the way I have with others I’ve healed. I wasn’t just being pulled in. I was being drawn toward something.”
“Toward something? Toward what?” Richard asked.
“Something dark. Something dark and sinister. As I got closer, I heard voices.”
That was something Richard had not expected. “Voices? What kind of voices?”
“At first I didn’t know what the sound was. At first it was a distant buzzing. As I sank ever faster toward the darkness within her, I realized that what I was hearing were screams.”
Richard frowned. “Screams? I don’t understand. What do you mean, you were hearing screams? How could you hear screams?”
Sammie stared off, as if experiencing it again. “It was like a thousand screams all melted together.” She shook her head at her own description, or maybe in an effort to escape the memory. She looked back up at him. “No, not like a thousand. Like a million. Like a million million. It was like an infinite number of screams welling up from a dark place. They were the most horrific, terrifying, anguished screams you can imagine. The kind of screams that seemed as if they might sear the flesh from your bones.”
Richard couldn’t help glancing back down at Kahlan. “Did you see anything?” he asked. “Did you see where these screams were coming from?”
Sammie twisted her hands, bending her fingers as she tried to find words. “I, I was being pulled toward darkness. But then I saw that it wasn’t darkness, exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was more like a writhing mass of forms. That was where the screams were coming from. A turning, churning, tumbling mass of spirits that were all wriggling, struggling, squirming, and screaming at once.”
Richard stood stunned, unable to imagine what was going on.
Sammie looked frustrated trying to come up with the right words for what she had seen. “I’m sorry that I can’t explain it very well, but when I saw it, felt it, I knew that it was death I was seeing. It was death itself. I knew it, that’s all.”
Richard made himself take a breath. “That certainly sounds frightening, and while I can’t explain it, that doesn’t mean that it was death you were seeing.”
Sammie tilted her head to the side as she frowned up at him. “But it was, Lord Rahl. I know it was.”
Richard was impatient to get the young sorceress back to the task of healing Kahlan, but he reminded himself that he had to be understanding of not only her age and inexperience, but her fears. This was all new to her, and her mother was not there to help her. He suspected that she was simply misinterpreting the pain resulting from the seriousness of Kahlan’s injuries.
“Sammie, it was probably the terrible pain, the profound hurt within Kahlan, that you were encountering. I’ve healed grievously injured people before, so I know how frightening it can be. Being immersed in their suffering is a dark and daunting experience. Time seems to stop. The world of life can seem distant. Lost in that strange place with their pain, you know that what is hurting them could kill them, and only you can stop it. You know that they’re facing death if you can’t help them.”
“No,” Sammie insisted as she shook her head. “When I looked through that shimmering green curtain, I knew I was looking beyond the veil into the world of the dead.”
Richard froze still as stone. The room seemed too quiet, too small, too hot.
“What did you say?”
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips. “When I looked beyond that curtain, I knew that I was looking beyond the veil into—”
“You said it was green.”
Sammie’s brow bunched as she fought back new tears. “That’s right.”
“Why would you say it’s green?”
Perplexed, she frowned up at him. “Because it was. It was like a shimmering green curtain of fog. It rippled, brighter and darker, something like a wispy, sheer, transparent green curtain moving in a breath of breeze. It’s kind of hard to describe.
“Beyond that awful veil of green I saw what looked to me like a churning mass of spirits. They were all screaming as if in terrible agony. That was the sound I heard. Some of the forms ripped apart as they screamed, while yet more of them constantly boiled up from the blackness below to take the place of those that disintegrated, in turn adding their ghastly screams to the sea of souls, all fusing into one, long, hopeless cry.
“Some of them saw me and tried to grab for me, but they couldn’t reach through that green veil. Others beckoned me to come to them instead. It was death calling to me, trying to pull me in.”
Richard turned and stared down at Kahlan. He had encountered the underworld a number of times. The veil before the world of the dead was always an eerie green color.
He slowly sank to his knees beside the unconscious form of the woman he loved more than life itself. “Dear spirits, what is going on?”
What is it?” Ester looked back and forth between Sammie and Kahlan. “Lord Rahl, what is it? Do you know what it means? Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
Instead of answering, Richard laid a hand on Kahlan’s shoulder, feeling her warmth, her breathing, the life in her. Despite how sick he felt, he ignored his own pain. She was in grave trouble and needed help. She needed gifted help.
She needed more help than Sammie was able to give.
He shut himself off from everything around him as he retreated into the calm center within himself. The people outside in the corridors and rooms of the cliff dwelling no longer seemed at all close. The faint undertone of their voices gradually faded away. Ester’s and Sammie’s voices became distant murmurs as he focused on what needed to be done, on what Kahlan needed done.
In that inner silence, he sought to release himself into Kahlan to heal her, or at least to try to sense what the problem was. He wanted to see it for himself. He wanted to deal with it himself. He wanted to extinguish that hidden terror. Most of all, he wanted to take away her pain. He ached to see her open her eyes and smile up at him.
Even though he had healed Kahlan before when she had been grievously hurt, this time as he tried desperately to call forth that healing ability within himself, he couldn’t seem to find the way to do it. It didn’t exactly feel as if he was having difficulty recalling how to heal—it felt more like he had never known how to do it. It was maddening to feel like he knew